Taking on TransCanada.

• Author: Saldana, Dave

February 13, 2013, was a special day in Washington, D.C. It wasn't merely because hundreds of demonstrators marched in front of the White House to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. It wasn't because environmental activists like Robert Kennedy Jr. and celebrities like Daryl Hannah were among the dozens of demonstrators arrested. Nor was it due to the arrests of veteran civil rights leader Julian Bond and former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who famously said developing Canada's tar sands would be "game over" for the climate, what made this day special.

"This call for climate action is important enough that, for the first time in our 120-year history, we have suspended the Sierra Club's longstanding policy that prohibits civil disobedience," Chin wrote. "Today is a one-time event to face arrest in order to elevate discussion about a critical issue."

"We want to send a strong message that we expect the President's ambitions to meet the scale of the challenge and reject a pipeline that carries dirty, thick oil," Brune said, encouraging President Obama to "fight with both fists" on the issue.

While it's far from clear that Obama is taking his advice, opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline sure are--and not only the big environmentalists, like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, and, of course, Bill McKibben's 350.org, which has done so much to draw attention to the crisis of climate change. "We've destabilized the planet's climate system, and the only question is how much farther we're going to go," he told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! If we don't reverse direction, he said, "what we call civilization will just be a big disaster response operation."

Some groups, like Bold Nebraska, which is part of Progress Now, have a lot of skin in the game. With the pipeline routed through their land and posing a catastrophic risk to their water and their livelihoods, farmers and ranchers in rock-ribbed, red-state Nebraska are making common cause with Prius-driving Greens, and a wide swath of Americans of many stripes in between.

Tea Partiers have been some of the strangest of bedfellows with environmental activists. In addition to their concerns about the viability of their property, many farmers and ranchers have taken great offense at TransCanada's efforts to force people off their land.

TransCanada has already begun eminent domain actions in dozens of cases from South Dakota to Texas.

"The fact that there is such a diverse and strong and motivated coalition that's come together to fight the Keystone pipeline is yet another indication of what a bad deal this is for the entire country. It's not just ardent environmentalists who are concerned about this," says Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. "When you have lifelong environmentalists standing with landowners standing with members of the Tea Party saying this is bad for a country, this is not in our national interest."

"When a company like TransCanada comes along and tries to bully and intimidate us into signing unwanted easement...